Political

More than a month after the elections, to those in the Black community and elsewhere, deflated by the return of GW Bush to office after a rancorous, at time brutal, high stakes campaign, I say: get over it, we have work to do.

Lamenting over the prospects of the next four years is inhibiting our ability to process the implications of some very real lessons: first, most whites in the US are largely unsympathetic to the plight of Blacks and other dark peoples in the world; second, the Democrats are not willing or able to address our needs; and finally, the solution to our problems don’t lie in further empowering the Democratic party, but, rather, in empowering ourselves.

Lost in the near euphoria following the recent Supreme Court decision is a harsh reality: the new version of affirmative action has absolutely nothing to do with either the redress of past wrongs or a policy designed to advance the chronically underdeveloped Black community. In fact, the Bollinger decision ushers in a new era in which affirmative action exists not for the purpose of advancing the Black community, but to better provide for whites.

Since the 1950s, the affirmative action debate has revolved around the central question of how best to redress the past and present affects of racial discrimination. Over the years the very framework of the debate shifted so fundamentally, that the term "affirmative action" literally does not mean the same today as it meant even a decade ago.

On June 22, 2006, the FBI arrested seven Black men, based in the Liberty City section of Miami, Florida, charging them with various counts of planning acts of violence. What distinguishes this case from the myriad of other Black men arrested in poor, oppressed communities is not that the men had no weapons to commit the acts of violence or even that they clearly lacked the capacity to advance the plot ascribed to them, but that in the arrests, the U.S. Government invoked the 't' word- “terrorism.”

As the shock from Art Teele’s dramatic suicide begins to fade and details of his final thoughts emerge, an entire community is compelled to confront and come to terms with some uncomfortable realities. Some issues are already in the throws of heated debate, however, there is one issue which looms large, but speaks quietly, as if still hiding in the closet: Homophobia.

While a number of factors contributed to Teele’s decision to take his own life, it is most disconcerting that his final conversation with popular columnist Jim Defede focused on being “deeply upset” at allegations of a sexual tryst with another man and how those allegations leveled a “devastating impact” on his college bound son. Art Teele was literally embarrassed to death, not by what he did, but by what he imagined his supporters would think about him, given their attitudes towards homosexuality.